In this interview of The Blockchain Socialist podcast, the host Joshua Dávila delves into the world of eco-friendly innovation with Andrea Leiter, co-founder of **Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI), joined by Giulio Quarta they discuss the place of SNI in the Commons Economy Roadmap, a project spotlighting initiatives that marry technology with a commons-oriented economy.
Andrea shares SNI's journey, highlighting its mission to "flip the economics of ecology" by transforming how we value and support biodiversity. SNI uses blockchain to turn real-world ecological data into dynamic digital assets, such as NFTs, that fund conservation efforts directly. This innovative approach aims to break free from the traditional, unsustainable donation model, offering a fresh, engaging way to support environmental stewardship.
The conversation also tackles the ethical challenges of integrating financial systems with ecological goals, underscoring the potential of blockchain to drive meaningful, sustainable change in the fight to preserve our planet.
This interview is brought to you by Commons Economy Roadmap, Sovereign Nature Initiative and The Blockchain Socialist Podcast. It will also be available in podcast version, coming soon.
This transcription was automatically generated and manually abridged to facilitate the reading experience. Enjoy!
<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_lightgray.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_lightgray.svg" width="40px" /> TBS*:* The Blockchain Socialist, Joshua Dávila.
GQ: Giulio Quarta, from CCA and CER.
AL: Andrea Leiter, from Sovereign Nature Initiative.
In [brackets] edits and notes made by the editor.
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<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_lightgray.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_lightgray.svg" width="40px" /> Table of Contents
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Joshua Dávila, The Blockchain Socialist: Hi, everyone! You're listening to The Blockchain Socialist podcast. I'm Josh and I'm here today doing a continuation of our series for the Commons Economy Roadmap. I'm here with Giulio Quarta from the Crypto Commons Association, which is also a part of Breadchain Cooperative. They've been doing some really interesting research and work around what are the various projects out there that are facilitating a commons-oriented economy.
Before I go too far into it, today we're going to be speaking to Andrea Leiter, who is an assistant professor at the Amsterdam Center for International Law and is also a co-founder of Sovereign Nature Initiative, our main subject today.
But before we do that, maybe Giulio, I'll let you explain a bit. What is the commons economy roadmap and why is Sovereign Nation Initiative a part of the Roadmap.
Giulio Quarta: Hi Josh, hi Andrea. Glad to be here. So, the Commons Economy Roadmap is a research and promotion project. It's a mix of things, but basically we selected 20 of what we consider the best projects in the blockchain space (but not only blockchain, we want to become non-crypto focused), that are doing interesting actions in terms of alternative technologies or alternative economics, with a commons-oriented approach.
We are generating basic or advanced materials on these 20 projects. You can read the project cards about the 20 projects and Sovereign Nature Initiative is one of them. We recommend you to read the project card before listening to this, maybe it could be helpful! We produce various materials like the episode you are listening to right now.
Sovereign Nature Initiative [SNI from now] is in the Commons Economy Roadmap [CER from now], because it combines so many different interesting aspects and values, and there are many projects attempting to channel more funds to work on conservation: how we will discuss in the episode, most of them are plagued by either wrong values or toxic economics.
I think SNI is going in the right direction combining the best of what you can use in terms of blockchain technology but without plugging every stakeholder to the financial markets and speculative markets on ecological credits — which I think is the biggest problem in ReFi.
I met Andrea in Berlin at Funding the Commons 2023. We had a long talk about nature, politics… and I'm glad to be here to talk more about it.
TBS: Thanks for the intro. We'll just get right into it. Andrea, if you want to maybe give a slight introduction to yourself, in case you want to add anything more, and also an explanation of what SNI is at a high level.
Andrea Leiter: Yeah, sure, thank you very much. Giulio, It was really a wonderful and serendipitous moment that we met and ever since has been a nice collaboration and also wonderful to be here with you, Josh. I am a big fan of your podcast and I'm really happy to participate.
As you said in the introduction, I wear two different hats. I have my background really firmly in academia and have for a long time tried to think of how you can understand value and value generation through law, and how legal mechanisms constitute value, encode value, uphold value, allow certain forms of value to travel through time. So this was an academic obsession in many ways for me for a long time.
Then I think around 2015-2016, I fell deep down into the crypto rabbit hole, specifically because it was opening up these questions of what is money and just breaking them open and allowing a certain form of public discourse around them. So that was the fascination. And from there on I have been living a bit in these two worlds.
SNI is a project that emerged from this engagement with crypto and from the questions: what kind of transformative projects does this new form of value creation that is crypto enable? Is it possible? What are the limitations? What are the possibilities? How can we engage with that?
So, SNI is an initiative that I co-founded about four and a half years ago. We officially incorporated as a not for profit foundation in the Netherlands three years ago. We celebrated our official three year anniversary. I think it's also right to give it a lifetime of about three years because that's when we really started kicking into gear.
What brought SNI into life is what we internally have always been calling “flipping the economics of ecology”, and this is our internal way of trying to say what we are after. It has a lot to do with the with the fact that care work in general in this economy, be it in the health sector or in other sectors — or be it in ecology — is horrifically underfunded, always dependent on donations, dependent on volunteering, dependent on reproductive labor if you so wish, that it is invisibilized.
For us, the challenge with SNI was really to think “does this new token economy that allows to tokenize all sorts of things and express value in all sorts of ways, would that be a mechanism that finally enables to bring a different light to how value is understood and produced and, and acknowledged?”
Flipping the economics of ecology was an idea to say: “what if the value that is intrinsically there in biodiversity restoration and restorative work in general could be expressed in different ways, — which doesn't mean just in economic value and plugging it in and making it paid. What are really the possibilities?”
The potential in the blockchain sphere, as we all know, is endless. Potential is our favorite word in the universe, so we started with that same enthusiasm of saying “what can we do with this? This is really interesting, and there is lots of energy in the space and lots of good people, so let's try where we can go.”
For the first 2 years, I would say we really were mainly a research and development project. We have a very generous, philantropic funder who is into this vision to a degree that he said: “I'm going to be funding this and let's go wild and explore what we can do”.
For two years, we have been doing mainly hackathons: our mode of inquiry and our research mode was through hackathons because we always wanted to do bottom-up work. We wanted to start with concrete biodiversity steward projects, work with them, understand the context in which they are working and then try and see what technology — and more specifically the blockchain technology — could do for them.
Together with them we designed different challenges and we found different blockchain projects that would set up their own bountie. Ocean Protocol and Trent McConaughey also with his Nature 2. 0 article was always a big partner and a big supporter of SNI. Also other treasuries have generously given bounties to the hackathon.
This was a nice way of bringing people together with the biodiversity stewards and defining these challenges. We did this here in Amsterdam with former shipyards, a place called De Ceuvel, dear friends and collaborators of SNI for many years, which was engaged with toxic soil and phytoremediation, they use plants in order to detoxify the soil. They also have a collective working there and they have a cafe and offices for people who can't afford to pay office rent in Amsterdam and so on. It's a whole ecology. We did the first hackathon with them there, which was really beautiful, and we did a big event there also in order to do community building, to bring people of different walks of life together.
From there, we went to work with a project in Kenya. The idea behind that was indeed to try and say “look, technology works very differently in the global South, has very different demands and different possibilities. So let's do a project in the global South to understand what are the parameters there”. So we ran another hackathon with Kenya Wildlife Trust, and this is a little bit where we found our current way of work, and where we really landed on: ecodata and the value that ecodata can generate, and what we can do with it. This is where we are currently now exploring further.